[HN Gopher] Printegrated Circuits: Merging 3D Printing and Elect...
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Printegrated Circuits: Merging 3D Printing and Electronics
Author : rbanffy
Score : 61 points
Date : 2025-06-30 11:30 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| p0px wrote:
| Wanted to show off a similar project I did. I used tracks for
| dupoint wires in my model and used the GPIO pins to push through
| the wires to create connections.
|
| For the LED eyes, I created THT connectors using the ends of the
| dupoint wire ends.
|
| https://makerworld.com/en/models/672277-wabbt-wifi-bluetooth...
| nickpinkston wrote:
| People have been doing this for a long time, but it feels a
| little too purist to me.
|
| The components will still be the same, so you'll still need some
| kind of pick-n-place functionality to make anything, so why not
| just have another print head for making the traces / doing the
| PnP?
|
| The head could lay copper wire/foil tape for conductors and do
| standard PnP from trays / reels of components, which you'll need
| either way.
|
| It would be a little more geometrically limited than what this
| post imagines, but it would have the upside that it would
| actually work today and with most real electronics applications,
| unlike the low performance conductors made via conductive
| polymers as the OP's process imagines.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The head could lay copper wire/foil tape for conductors
|
| Sounds awesome, but this is an extremely hard problem to solve.
| You can't simply lay down wire or foil into arbitrary shapes on
| 3D surfaces.
| Lerc wrote:
| If you had a wire feeder with a actuated barrier just past
| the tip you can fairly easily bend wire into controlled
| shapes pretty well. If you printed channels for them to sit
| in, I think they could be placed.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| When I worked at Markforged we had a printer that could put
| solid carbon fiber threads into the print using a second
| extruder (on the same print head), so it's certainly
| possible. It was $20k, though. Getting this down to
| something accessible to hobbyists is the challenge. I think
| it will happen one day, though.
| Aurornis wrote:
| CNC wire benders exist, but they're solving a different
| problem: They bend the wire in free space, not on to a
| surface. You would have to design the part and the wire
| such that the part never comes around into the space
| occupied by the head, which would limit it to only very
| basic and small shapes.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| Maybe lay chains instead of wires. Apply tension to the
| chain, ensuring that it conducts current and use fast
| solidifying glue to fix it in place/make it adhere to the
| surface/insulate it.
| Lerc wrote:
| I was thinking you'd print a channel where the wire would
| be placed, bend the wire to the shape of the channel,
| place it, and print over the top.
|
| Some geometries wouldn't work, but it would be sufficient
| to make shapes like you see in breadboard connections
| (up, zigzag around, down)
| nickpinkston wrote:
| Yea, agreed it's pretty hard, though with some tradeoffs it
| could be done pragmatically.
|
| I would probably slightly overbuild the plastic and then use
| a heated tool to form the smoother surfaces the wire/foil
| would go in/on.
|
| I've also seen laser sputtering of copper, etc. which could
| be the another approach, something similar is used for
| metalizing plastic already, though contamination would need
| to be controlled to maintain low resistivity.
| Lerc wrote:
| A PnP placing the components upside down onto a surface printed
| by another head would be interesting. You could align the
| heights of the resting surfaces to optimise pads needing to be
| connected being on the same plane. I'd still want to lay copper
| but if you had the ability to squirt a little solder paste from
| (yet another) head, you could stack everything with wire
| connections into a very 3d circuit.
|
| If the base material was thermally conductive you could have a
| heatsink block with the circuit embedded in it.
| crote wrote:
| I think the "printegrated circuits" approach is roughly the
| right level of abstraction.
|
| 3D Printing the PCB itself is pretty much impossible for any
| non-trivial application. Doing multi-layer PCBs with 0.20mm
| wide traces, spaced 0.20mm apart? Forget it, not happening -
| and requirements like those are _standard_ for hobbyist-level
| chips like the RP2040 these days.
|
| And if you're not printing your own PCB, what's left is module-
| level assembly and connectivity. In other words, just printing
| a bunch of wires.
| zakqwy wrote:
| For this in 2D, see Sam's thesis, 6.3.3 (p. 86, CNC wire
| plotting). 3D would add a lot of challenges.
|
| https://cba.mit.edu/docs/theses/19.09.calisch.pdf
| tdeck wrote:
| This reminds me a bit of Multiwire, a somewhat unusual circuit
| manufacturing technique from the 1980s. A machine laid down
| wires and then encased them in resin. The best info I can find
| is this slide deck:
|
| https://www.swtest.org/swtw_library/2013proc/PDF/SWTW13-22.p...
|
| I believe this technique was used in the Three Rivers PERQ
| computers. Here is an image of one of their PCBs
| https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...
| seveibar wrote:
| There's a lot of potential for desktop rapid-prototyping with
| electronics. I think one of the things that is killing us is the
| tooling. One of the reasons I started building an autorouter was
| because I wanted to be able to have different "build targets"-
| e.g. a build target that is a PCB with no vias and only 0 ohm
| resistors (jumpers). If our EDA tooling supported different build
| outputs, then we could have earlier prototypes built with less-
| than-ideal equipment (e.g. conductive 3D printed filament, as the
| article suggests)
| xg15 wrote:
| On the one hand, I like the idea. On the other hand, I dread a
| future where you need an X-Ray and/or MRT machine to be able to
| inspect any kind of electronic device. And don't even think of
| disassembling or repairing...
| bitwrangler wrote:
| Has anyone used dark color 3D filament printed onto copper clad
| PCB as photo resist or etch resist?
|
| It might be tricky printing PLA directly to copper clad PCB, but
| then you could expose the board to UV or etchant to make the PCB
| traces. Then remove the PLA plastic to expose the copper traces.
| longtimelistnr wrote:
| assumedly much much easier to buy a cheap vinyl cutter, but
| interesting idea
| fainpul wrote:
| The toner transfer method uses a similar process and is
| probably easier. You don't need a 3D printer, but one of those
| laminating machines instead.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Anyone remember the Next Dynamics NexD1 Kickstarter?
|
| It was pitched back in 2017 as a "Multimaterial & Electronics"
| printer. Got to half a million or so in pledges before some of
| the backers uncovered serious red flags and Kickstarter suspended
| the campaign.
|
| Hope this effort fares better.
| monday_ wrote:
| I have been thinking about adding conductive traces a-la PCB to
| 3D prints in a DIY setting for a while. Obviously, conductive
| filaments exist - but they are not remotely in the same category
| as copper.
|
| My initial hope was that doping PLA, PETG or some other material
| with a conductor and then applying strong variable magnetic field
| near the print head to force creation of conductive domains while
| the filament is amorphous and hot. This turned out to be not
| feasible, as O3 explained to me repeatedly, over hours of chats.
|
| A simpler and surprisingly workable solution appears to be adding
| a second printing head loaded with tin. Tin is not as good as
| copper - but it's still leagues ahead of conductive filaments. To
| offset the poor conductivity you can use thin, but very broad
| traces.
|
| A speculative approach would work like this:
|
| 1. Print PETG layers using a regular filament, but leave "baths"
| for tin traces. A bath should be an opening at least 2-3
| millimeters tall, to account for the surface tension.
|
| 2. After N layers, fill the baths from the tin head. Tin melting
| point is near PETG, but it would cool rapidly and, hopefully,
| weld to the plastic.
|
| This way you could probably integrate a pcb into a print. I
| haven't tried that, but i recall people actually trying to print
| with tin - so that part is at least not a complete fantasy.
| pedalpete wrote:
| We are starting to see metal filaments and even this copper
| one[1]. Multi-filament fdm printers just might be able to make
| some rather large circuits. I doubt we'll get down to 0.2mm
| tracers, but if size isn't an issue, we can do better than the
| conductive carbon tpu(?) filaments which are common today.
|
| [1] https://www.gsc-3d.com/3d_materials/copper-filament/
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